Felan Reads the Webcomics 5: Lower Regions

Some Sundays, Felan is too busy to write a full profile, so he posts his favourite webcomics instead.

Alex Robinson is known for his Top Shelf-published graphic novels Box Office Poison and Tricked, both of which chronicle fairly mundane, everyday events, but Lower Regions is pure fantasy. The series began as a short print comic that followed the adventures of a Red Sonja-esque barbarian warrior fighting her way through a dungeon full of monsters – all presented with no dialogue! Robinson’s art charmingly invokes poorly-but-enthusiastically-sketched heroes and monsters in the margins of math homework, and he makes wonderful use of unique, pulpy title headers on each page. The current volume, currently being serialized online as Lower Regions: Entering the Blood Tunnel, follows a familiar D&D party (warrior, mage, cleric, rogue) as they descend into the dank gloom of an ancient system of catacombs full of iconic monsters, in search of a sacred artifact at the behest of a mysterious brotherhood. Robinson’s treatment is affectionate, and he lets the innate nerdy silliness of the subject matter speak for itself rather than relying on overt jokes and parody.